


All Quiet On The Home Front

by pinebluffvariant



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode s09e20: The Truth, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 12:31:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5585443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinebluffvariant/pseuds/pinebluffvariant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What's happened to my son, Walter?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Quiet On The Home Front

Time stops when you strip existence down to the basics: the body and whatever surrounds it. Waking up on the cold floor, Mulder blinks into the darkness and re-orients himself to his surroundings. 

In the wind-battered desert of New Mexico, he would lie on the small bed in the trailer (not his bed; his bed was waiting for him in DC) and do this. A Bureau shrink taught him a meditation technique once: body scanning. Start with your toes, she said, and focus on each body part as you go, all the way up your body. Awareness of the moment helps calm you down in times of stress. 

The moment, he thinks as his sleepy brain feels for his aching knees, his drawn up femurs, his tight pelvis, is all that exists anymore, in this place. In the darkness, time is a sniper’s laser on an endless wall of black, and he lulls himself into a momentary trance, tightrope walking on the beam past flashes of memory: The countless times they’ve shone lights into his face; cold mornings watching the sunrise; coyotes howling; crawling underneath his battered truck as police sirens screeched by; hundreds of unsent emails; dreams of two bodies, a woman and an infant, dumped carelessly alongside highway 380 at Bitter Lake; the first kiss and the last; his son’s downy head beneath his lips-

Mulder scans his chest and feels nothing when footsteps start reverberating through what he imagines is the concrete expanse beyond the steel door. His eyes snap open; he knows what this means. He shoots upright and scrambles backward against the wall with his legs. The zip ties they use to bind his wrists are really starting to piss him off.

The door opens, steel scraping against concrete, and Mulder squints at the assault of the light. He braces himself for a round of blows, but none come. When the orbs inside his eyelids have disappeared, he open his eyes and scans his surroundings.

Walter Skinner stands above him, dark and serious. Mulder blinks and nods when Skinner puts a hand up to his lips, _be quiet._

Crouching down before him, Skinner’s low voice snaps Mulder out of his still-lingering trance: “We don’t have much time. They will come back in one minute.”

“Where are we? How did you find me?”, he rasps, voice unused to anything but grunting and yelling. Mulder tries to catch his friend’s eyes but the glare on Skinner’s glasses obscures them. He finds himself inching away from this intrusive body, flinching pre-emptively.

Skinner holds up his hand to the side of his face, shielding his mouth from the camera in the ceiling to their right, and leans in even closer. “Mulder, they’re accusing you of murder. You’re going to court martial in the morning. They wanted to disappear you altogether but word travels fast, and we were able to track you down. We’re working on getting you the best defense, but you know how these people operate. Kersh-”

“Scully,” Mulder says, his mind suddenly completely clear. There is an absence in the room despite the closeness between him and his tether to the outside world. “Scully, where is she, is she okay?”

Skinner says nothing. Mulder’s ears ring, louder than from any blow to the head: _She’s gone. She’d dead. She’s not coming. She doesn't want to. William._

“I called her as soon as I knew. She’s on her way,” Skinner says. Nothing more.

The ringing doesn’t stop, it intensifies: _William, William, William._

“Mulder, you have to prepare yourself for-”

“What’s happened to my son, Walter?” He has never stripped himself bare like this, but any pretense to personhood and dignity is utterly useless at this point. He has failed in every respect.

Glancing over his shoulder, Skinner listens to the distant stomping of boots down the corridor behind them, then snaps his head back. “Listen to me.” His eye-teeth glisten in the stark light of the room. “William is fine. But things happened, he was in danger, he- Scully had no choice.”

_Oh, god._

“She arranged for his placement with a family. A closed adoption.”

The eggshell-brittle hope Mulder had for them lies shattered on the floor. He clasps his own bound hands between his bent legs as if in pointless prayer, and grinds his knuckles into the concrete. “She had to give him up.” 

“It was an impossible situation.” Skinner stands up, suddenly. “Play along,” he growls, “we’ll be back soon.” His overcoat cuts through a flare of flashlight as uniformed officers gruffly lead him out of the cell.

The door slams and time stops again. Mulder sits in the darkness, writhing inside with the longing for her, and the anguish for everything he’s done, everything he didn’t do, that led to this moment. The ghost of ten pounds of life, of him and Scully, presses down onto his useless body, then vanishes in a wisp of smoke. The back of his head makes hollow contact with the wall, and he sees stars. Red hair and blue eyes flash before him, and he swallows stale air and bites his lip, tasting copper. 

The quiet is deafening. He realizes that by fighting, what he thought was the righteous fight, he has left his own world in ruins. They have been right all along. He is a guilty man. He deserves the harshest punishment for his crimes.


End file.
